Discovery and functional characterisation of a luqin-type neuropeptide signalling system in a deuterostome

Abstract

The results presented in this paper have not been published previously in whole or in part. The work reported in this paper was supported by grants from the BBSRC awarded to M.R.E (BB/M001644/1) and J.H.S. (BB/M001032/1). L.A.Y.G is supported by a PhD studentship awarded by the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT studentship no. 418612) and Queen Mary University of London. We are grateful to Philipp Bauknecht and Gáspár Jékely (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany) for providing the Gα16 plasmid and the CHO-G5A cells, which were originally generated by Baubet et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 97:7260–7265). We are also grateful to Phil Edwards for his help with collecting starfish, Paul Fletcher for maintaining our seawater aquarium and Maria Eugenia Guerra for creating the silhouettes of animals used in Figure 7